Most laptops include a built-in camera, typically located just above the top edge of the screen.

This type of camera is generally marketed as a “video chat” or “conference call” camera.

The issue:

When a person is on a video call, they tend to look at the image on the screen instead of directly at the camera. (Of course!)

So from the camera’s perspective—and the perspective of the remote video chat partner—the person using the webcam isn’t making eye contact, and is instead looking down semi-randomly.

Proposal:

We can solve the “video chat participant is not making eye contact” scenario by reducing the angle between the camera and the screen.

There are two straightforward ways to do this:

Solution #1: Move the laptop much farther away, so the camera and display are at nearly the same angle from the video chatter’s perspective.

Solution #2: Move the camera so that it is in front of the display. This is the solution we will be exploring.

Implementing Solution #1 is impractical with a laptop, since it (in most cases) needs to be relatively close to the user.

But Solution #2 is easy: we can put the camera on a swiveling arm and allow it to swing down to the middle of the screen (Figure 1).

Eye contact problems solved!

Fig. 1: Left: a normal laptop camera. Even though the chat participants are both making eye contact with the image on their screens, they are actually looking down from the perspective of the top-mounted camera. Right: now that the camera has been “swiveled” to the center of the screen, the chat participants are making eye contact in a natural manner.

PROS: Solves the weird eye gaze issues inherent to video chatting.

CONS: Adds a new fragile plastic part to snap off your laptop.

Bonus Part 1: A simpler solution:

Solution #3: The camera doesn’t actually have to move in order to have its viewpoint moved to the center of the display: the same result can be achieved with a small periscope (or fiber optic cable) that hangs on the laptop lid and redirects the camera view to the center of the screen.

One could imagine that such an aftermarket attachment could be manufactured extremely cheaply. Perhaps this is a good crowdfunding opportunity!

Bonus Part 2: Overly complicated solutions:

Solution #4: Create a partially-transparent laptop screen and put the camera behind it. This would probably require a new and highly specialized LED panel manufacturing process.

Solution #5: Edit the video feed in software, changing the user’s eyes in real time to always point directly at the screen. This is probably feasible, but it could be somewhat unsettling. (See also the related “touch up my appearance” face-smoothing feature on Zoom).

Related Idea:

See also: the laptop camera prism idea for including multiple people on a single machine on a conference call.

The incredible amount of information available about each option (“analysis paralysis“). This is especially seen in purchasing of consumer electronics (e.g. a new stereo system or a television).

The solution:

Fortunately, the solution is very straightforward, and can be implemented by any web shopping site (see mockup in Figure 1):

The user finds an item on the web site that is similar to what they’re looking for.

The user adds this item to their shopping cart with a special button marked “SURPRISE ME.”

Instead of adding the exact clicked-on item to their cart, the web site adds a similar randomly-chosen item that costs anywhere between 75% and 125% of the price of the clicked on item.

The user is not informed of the actual contents of their shopping cart at checkout, only the total cost.

A few days later, the mystery item arrives at the user’s house by mail.

Fig. 1: Here, we see an online store that has a “surprise me” button that will allow the user to purchase a random item that matches their requirements (at left). (This is an alternate version of the situation described in the “solution” section above).

Conclusion:

Using the system above, decision paralysis can be avoided. This increases both the rate of all-devouring consumption of your customers, AND your company’s profit margins!

PROS: Could be legitimately implemented, probably does not break any local or national laws!

It uses battery life, which might be in short supply depending on how often you can charge your phone.

A barrage of linked “clickbait” articles (with interesting photos) attempt to lure you away from reading any serious journalism.

Proposal:

Here, we propose to re-introduce newspaper kiosks, but with a twist: instead of providing a newspaper, the kiosk simply prints the day’s news onto your arm, as mocked up in Figure 1.

Then, you can easily read it at your leisure, without being distracted by phone messages, annoying ads, and low-battery indicators.

Fig. 1: Just put your arm on the surface above, and the printing apparatus will write the day’s news on it in less than 15 seconds. Convenient! Since the system is entirely automated, enough money is saved on wages to afford a full-time 1930s-era newsboy to stand next to it and shout “Extra, Extra!”

The result of this printing apparatus is shown in Figure 2.

Fig. 2: News of the day, as written on one (or both) arms.

The mockup looks quite successful so far, but there is a caveat that will restrict its market size, shown in figure 3.

Fortunately, there is practical enhancement that will improve the experience for everyone (Figure 4).

Fig. 4: Luminous ink (non-radioactive) is the solution: not only does this work well for both light and dark skin, but it also lets you read the news in the dark, as shown above. In fact, there’s no way to turn it off, so you can’t even avoid reading the news when it is dark out. Not that you’d want to anyway, of course!

Conclusion:

Perhaps this would be a way to resurrect print journalism.

PROS: Provides great way to stay up-to-date on current events without being distracted by ads and clickbait articles. This will lead to an informed electorate and strong democracy.

CONS: Of limited utility in ares where short-sleeved shirts are not worn. Ideal test market would be a tropical location with a casual dress code.

Using a cell phone outdoors can present two main problems, as shown in Figure 1. Specifically, you may be far from a tower (and thus, get poor reception) and the harsh light of the noon sun may make it very difficult to read the text on your phone, especially with the recently-popularized “dark mode” user interface themes.

Fig. 1: A) This cell phone is far from a tower, so it gets bad reception (and the battery drains faster). B) the harsh glare of the sun makes it hard to read the screen. Pros and cons of the sun: PRO: allows life to exist on Earth. CON: makes it hard to read Internet comments.

Proposal:

This new fashion accessory, the “Cell Phone Cowl” (Figure 2, A.K.A. “cell phone hood,” or “cell phone wimple”), allows the outdoor phone user to always have a shaded area for using their cell phone.

Additionally, the hood can have a built-in antenna (shown here as an external antenna, although it would probably be possible to run the antenna along the perimeter of the fabric instead). This will allow for better reception even in such remote and cell-phone-inhospitable locations as Downtown San Francisco.

Fig. 2: C) The external antenna (plugged into the cell phone by an old-style phone cable) allows this cell phone user to get 5 bars of reception, despite their remote location. D) The hood / cowl provides shade, allowing the user to read Internet posts while cowering from the harsh light of the sun.

Conclusion:

You should pre-order your cell phone cowl before the waitlist gets too long!

CONS: An external antenna might hit door frames if you forget to collapse it before going inside, but an internal antenna would make it difficult to machine-wash the cowl. The horrible price of progress!

Online communities often have rivalries with one another, especially if the topics that they cover are extremely similar. For example, one could imagine a vicious feud between two different communities of saltwater aquarium enthusiasts.

Proposal:

Maybe we can harness and direct this mean-spiritedness in an interesting way that will, if nothing else, at least entertain outside observers like the gladiatorial matches of the Roman Empire.

To this end, the proposal is to encourage these communities to battle each other in a “survival of the fittest” environment with tangible consequences beyond just ruining a person’s day over the internet.

Details:

For the initial setup, each community on the web site (e.g. each subforum or “subreddit” in Reddit terminology) is allocated ample server resources, so the community can function normally (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: With existing forum software, these various topics could have their own subforums, and the subforums’ denizens are not required to directly interact with each other.

We can represent the total number of server resources as a continent (Figure 2), and the individual subforums as nations within that continent.

Then, each month, a certain percentage of server resources are considered to be “contested” war zones that communities can fight over (Figure 3).

If a subforum community has too few resources, the following negative consequences may occur:

Extremely slow page loads.

Images are artificially rate-limited to load slowly from top to bottom, to provide an “old modem” feel.

Images downsampled to highly-compressed JPEGs.

Images downsampled to 256 colors (or even lower).

Videos re-scaled to VHS quality.

Inability to register new subforum members.

Deletion of old / historical posts.

Fig. 2: This is a map of a fictional continent, where “nations” (the various colors) represent the server resources applied toward each subforum. Larger territory indicates more server resources.

Since forum “combat” is highly metaphorical, there are a number of ways that it could be quantified and used to determine winning / losing subforums.

The number of long-running conversations in a subforum that can be successfully derailed and closed by infiltrating agents of an “enemy” subforum. Example: if a forum thread about remote-control helicopters can be transformed into a vitriolic argument about the nature of capitalism, it will count as a “win” for the infiltrating agents if that thread is closed by moderators for being off-topic / overly-toxic.

The number of successful emotional reactions that can be baited out of one subforum by trolls from another subforum. This could be indicated by either automated “word sentiment analysis” or by counting the number of instances of posts that are flagged for inappropriate content.

The number of irrelevant / off-topic meme images that can be placed in an “enemy” subforum, derailing any productive conversation.

Fig. 3: Every so often, certain server resources are available for the communities to fight over. The winning subforum can thus seize territory (resources) from the loser.

Conclusion:

This is a great way to increase user loyalty and cause users to become more emotionally invested in your social media site or forum hosting site.

When you receive a message on a phone, usually the phone vibrates or makes an alert sound.

The issue:

If someone sends several short messages in a row (e.g. “Here is the restaurant:” “(link to restaurant address)” “We’ll be there at 7 pm.”) or if a conversation has several participants, your phone will be constantly buzzing at random times.

This can be annoying (Figure 1).

The current “solution” to this is totally inadequate: you need to manually set the phone to “Do Not Disturb” for some amount of time. This requires manually futzing with the phone and must be done every single time. Additionally, Do Not Disturb is typically optimized for ease of setting in hour-long increments, but it’s very likely that the burst of messaging activity will only last for a few minutes. In that scenario, you’d still be missing new messages 55 minutes later.

Fig. 1: This conversation has 8 participants, so the phone is constantly buzzing with texting activity.

Proposal:

Instead of notifying the user every time a new messages comes in, the phone could mute further notifications (from the same app) until certain conditions were met.

This “rate limiting” step would mute incoming messages unless one or more of the following was true:

A certain amount of time has elapsed (e.g., no more than one notification per conversation thread in a 5-minute period).

The user checks the phone (indicating that they are at least somewhat engaged in the messaging process).

The user replies to a message.

This way, if you’re driving or in a situation where you don’t want to check your phone, it won’t be constantly demanding your attention (Figure 2, right).

Fig. 2: Left: the current situation. Right: the “solved” situation where each communication app is rate-limited.

Conclusion:

It is surprising that this is not a currently available default option (maybe it is, somewhere!).

The developers who would have added this feature have probably been reassigned to implement increasingly-specific Emoji instead (presumably “blue lobster wearing a party hat” is coming soon).

PROS: Prevents you from being distracted by your phone while you’re in a meeting / in class / at a wedding / etc.

CONS: Implementing this feature would require reassigning highly skilled programmers who are currently working on cutting-edge features like “be a talking ‘pile of poo’ Emoji.”

This will automatically get rid of many types of classic low-signal posts (e.g. the historical but rarely-seen-noawadays “First post”) and reposted memes. (This may or may not be desirable, depending on the type of site being run, of course.)

Fig. 1: If a user posts some text (or an image) that was seen before, they will get an error message similar to this one.

Observation about images:

Since images must be unique to be reposted, the easiest way to re-post a meme image would be to make a small change to it and re-save it (or make no change at all, but re-save it using a lossy compression method). For a lossy image format like JPEG, this would lead to an interesting situation in which memes became more and more corrupted-looking as they are modified and re-posted over and over. This would even allow the lineage of a meme to be traced by looking at its variously-compressed versions.

CONS: If a 32-digit hexadecimal number is used as the output of the “fingerprinting” hash function, then only a maximum of 16**32 comments can ever be made to your web site. If your web site gets 1 million unique posts per year, then some time in the year 340,282,366,920,938,448,064,954,991,902,720 A.D., all of the hash values will be used up, and people will no longer be able to post on your web site. Also, your visitor counter will probably have overflowed by then!